watch us in hd. >> this sunday night, institute fellowlicy studies phyllis bennett. >> why are they so violent? these questions are important. what is more important in some ways, what is the u.s. policy regarding isis, why isn't it working? can we go to war against terrorism? is it wrong to say there should be a war against terrorism at all? those questions are the most important and the most useful.

>> each week, american history tv sits in on a lecture. you can watch classes here at 8:00 and midnight eastern. next, donald miller talks about what daily life was like for british and american airmen during world war ii and how their experiences differed from infantrymen. hours.ass is two prof. miller: i'm going to show you some slides. .t is not a pro forma lecture ,f you have questions observations, let me know. where we are at the 1943.

we have invaded sicily, we have invaded italy. we are beginning to win the title of the atlantic. an enormous russian victory at stalingrad. hurting, now the war is beginning to reverse itself. we are going to turn back a little bit to the beginning of the american participation and take that through d-day. next up we will do the d-day invasion. ok. there is the basis, east anglia. i have been there a lot. englandbackward area of

, only 60 miles from london but it might as well be six centuries away. as i say, it is shaped like a giant hachette aimed at no azi, germany. this is the closest space you can get. the fighter boys were further south, down here. the british pilots and bomber command was north near york. you have this in your book. you don't have it in color. you have the ranges of the fighter aircraft, how far they could get. that tells you the course of the air war. in the beginning we can only do this in the shallow penetration missions. if you're trying to knock them featured in the

great film 12:00 high, they are mostly british. you get further into the war, fighters with longer range. thunderbolts and lightning. they can take the german bombers. this is the war of the industrial area of germany. then these boys are on their own. ,hese missions you read about they are going down a corridor, a bloody shoot all the way from here to the target and back. they go to regensburg, all the way to italy, to north africa. when you get the people 51 mustang, the mustang has long legs and it can go deep in germany. it can go all the way into

-- nd to prompt prague. hemingway says the dominant feature of warfare is chance. even our commanders didn't expect it. they were pressing for the planes. they get into production late but it shows up just in the neck of time. those are the stages of the air war. any questions on the? that? student: with the initial bomb runnings, when the bombers would be turned with the flight that carried them out, would they be waiting for them? prof. miller: not necessarily.

they went in waves. even when they had the mustang. they fly out with thunderbolt coverage to hanover and then the mustang would take off from england. they would overtake them. then there will be another fighter group waiting for them while they returned. once they got to the target they were on their own and they start back. they are picked up. , if it is armines mustang it is going to pick them up. the thunderbolt is not going to pick them up until you get to the german border. they depend on those guys all the way. student: for they have counted ,n for the missions they ran like the fighters shooting at ground targets? prof. miller: as part of the mission? student: when they can't have our they are going out, with elite extra room to run the

mission prof. miller:? what do little started to do, the mustang already has tremendous fuel efficiency, it is a nimble plane, it is powerful. it can go a long way. weight hurts you in some ways if you run into opposition. let's say the luftwaffe means you. you have to drop those tanks. the guys go out on the reserve tanks. then the plane is nimble and can fight a dogfight. that is how they planned the operation. doolittle takes over. your most important mission is to dive and kill as many planes on the ground. them on theng

ground as well. fighter boys love that stuff. that is not the best film footage. they had those cameras on the guns. you get that kind of footage. anybody else? ok. sensere you get a better of the targets. they are going to be initially right here. normandy.ok a trip to we stopped here. immense submarine fortification. then you see some of the other key spots. when they finally put an air force in italy through the south here, that is the 15th air force. they will fly over the outs and , dresden, evene

berlin. germany has almost no match for oil. this will be a air force territory here. germany is getting it from both sides here and here. you get daylight bombing, and the raf at night. from italy they would mount missions across here into romania because romania germany gets most natural oil from romania. it is important to knock out spots there. this is where the african-american pilots flew, the tuskegee airmen, out of italy. they escorted to eastern europe. russians, where

they able to mount the aerial campaign? prof. miller: good point. no. there is only two countries in the world that have these four engined bombers, britain and the united states. germany tried to put one into production and ran into problems even with their crack engineers. the russians concentrated .ntirely on strategic air force they had to engine bombers. .hat is how they bombed britain they don't have these babies that can go long distances. we are the only countries that have this sort of thing. anybody else question? there is the picture. there is the instrument of destruction. a b-17. it looks big.

.t looks big on the ground it looks like the cabin on the submarine. crew ina 10-11 person here. you get a plexiglass nose. youof the first missions, might have read this. was a page whoty had the glass on the front. it knocked the splinters into their heads. 26,000 deaths later. that first mission was a cake run. you have a navigator sitting at a desk, he is the boy. he has to get you the target. , he is ato a guy history major.

he is about to go into his junior year. drafted, six months later he is navigating a bomber to scotland with a crew of five. the gunners in the back of the plane went to his ship. these guys are not well trained. they are rushed into this war. that explains the early casualties. a lot of responsibility on a navigator. this highlyer has sophisticated instrument called a norton bomb sign. you aim at the target. whether, the wind, height your app. day,ould on a clear, clean

desert conditions, you could drop bombs into a circle as big as this room. the idea was this was going to be a great secret weapon of the war. , theree cruise landed were two guards that went out. they escorted the bomb sign with them. matter thateally much after retired because the germans, there were enough crashes and these instruments were saints of the germans knew what was going on but they never implemented one. that is the front of the plane. you step up in here into the , and pilots. behind this, standing behind them is a guy called the engineer. he knows all the instruments.

anything goes wrong, he is watching all the dials. attack, he just sticks his head into that thing. powerful machine guns. the best we have. you have 10 of them on the plane. that is the front of the plane. they are all opposites. veryill across a precariously narrow catwalk. you could not get them closed. somehow cranked down on this thing and throw the -- close the bomb doors by hand or a bomb would stick. in racks.were

you had to unleash this bomb and drop it through. .here are cases of guys falling then you move back into the back . this is where my father was trained. everybody is wired up. it is symbolic of the organic bombs. and the symbol, they are all on the same wire. they are connected technologically and personally. have an interphone. when they talk to each other on the plane nobody else can hear that. unless he hooks of a general generallynal, they are on silence.

all the way to the target. there is not much direction from the home base. these kids are entirely on their own. i don't think there has been a case where a guide this young, the average age is 22 years old, the old man is 26 years old. he would generally be the pilot. so, it is a lot of responsibility. entirely in the hands of the own navigator, and whether you destroy the target or not, it is up to you. terrific amount of pressure on these kids. on each side there is a machine gun. narrow, when one guy is narrowed, the back is touched. these things are open to the weather.

if there is a little heat from the engine, the compartment isn't heated. , inwould be over germany january, five below zero inside the plane. 26,000 feet. that explains the proper predominantthe frostbite. frostbite can be a killer. and stickclose these the gunther a whole. heardt know if you ever the expression the whole nine yards. for going all the way. that was the length of a machine gun. ammunition boxes for here. it was nine yards from here to these guns. you could get underneath here if

there was a pilot. himself is the gunner. we track into the plane when they take off and land. a tough position to bn. that is the b-17. >> how often do the guns jammed? good question. they generally jammed for two reasons. cold weather. everything breaks down in cold weather. the other thing is over healing. -- overheating. up in yourcan blow face. you have to be careful of that. that happened. in a prolonged air battle. generally it would not last more

than 30 minutes. unless you are going to stuttgart. the germans are flying over their homeland. they can go up and get you, refuel, get you again. they may land four times trying to get a fleet of bombers. up could have guns clog conditions like that with persistent fire. anybody else? student: it said in the movie yesterday it was so cold, their hands would freeze to the gun. was it difficult to and jammed them? prof. miller: you were two sets of gloves. a light racetrack driver soaked silk gloves.

.hey were not weather resistant they wore gloves over that. you took off the larger glove and then put the silk glove on and hope that did not stick. sometimes guys, in the chaos of combat, your gun jams and you are in danger, you pull both gloves off and try to clear the gym. you have not been told this before. maybe it is your first mission. your hand would stick their. at that temperature. you would stick to it. that is what is going on here. nobody, they are fighting at four miles high. no one had flown before this. the big thing is, everything is

new. you get new kinds of problems, new kinds of medicine, everything. these guys are lab rats. everything is experimental. student: how quick were air commands to adapt? prof. miller: very quick. i will tell you where they were slow. -- all the idea thinking went into the technology of the plane. boeing makes it. they start producing these things in 1935. they get into production of prototypes. we start to mass-produce them. everything is sophisticated. nobody thought about the guys. your problems. if you go up in a commercial plane you start to have your

ears pop. these guys are under permission -- pressure and unpressurized cabins. your problems are a regular problem in addition to frostbite. nobody had thought of that. nobody thought of giving these guys armor. , the met in museum new york city, which has all these old medieval armor. they had met artists to design armor for these guys. when they went on the bomber they put helmets on with holes in the ears to listen with earphones pretty put on a vast, est that was candace on the outside and steel on the inside. that provided protection. if you got a flak burst, a piece

of shrapnel that blew through the aluminum of the plane, it is very thin. that is why it is so cold. you can go with a screwdriver and go like that and drive a screwdriver through the plane. that is how thin the aluminum is. they took a lot of punishment but they had a good superstructure here, here, across that. you could literally blow out the sides. sometimes the whole area of the plane would be exposed. they could see the gunners in there. they are exacting all the time later on. it could this thing on. this is a gun operated by the bombardier. , a form ofthe radar

guidance system on the plane. the making modifications as they go along. were any of the members on the plane trained as a medic? prof. miller: no. you are a moraine, your buddy goes down, medic. but some sulfur on the wound. untilon't have penicillin 1944. all you can do is stop an infection. a guy goes down here with nomadic. medic. file, a vial of morphine. as soon as a guy went down you take him out of his misery and you give a shot of morphine.

a couple of blankets may be. you hope he survives. i described one incident where a guy went down in the front of the plane, and he was in the section here, in the middle of a chaotic air battle. the pilot is usually checking everybody. sometimes he passes on that responsibility to the navigator. everything ok back there? reading oxygen? a lot of the time their masks would clog up. the guy doing the checking goes down. planen the floor of the for an hour. when they got him back to england they cut off his ears, they fell off. his nose fell off. his lips were gone. his eyeballs frozen his head and had to be removed. frostbite.

a killer. most of these times they would use the russian cure. they would wait until everything turned purple, turned black, and then they would start falling off. then you could treat the guy. rough stuff. it was done on the base. where there is a doctor. onre's a little hospital every base, and a general hospital if you needed surgery, amputation, all the smaller stuff is done at the base. anyone else? on the plane itself? was there any prior scientific research over weather conditions were -- i was a trial and error? trial and error. now we had a lot of research on mountain climbers. people go up here.

i was in colorado when the book came out. i saw the airport they have these books about mountain climbing in the himalayas and places like that. up only 4-5re going miles. amountve to pay $400,000 in major climb. they are getting paid $3000 a day and are getting shot at. this.isn't a lot of there is not a lot of thought. the crazy thing is when they are developing this plane they thought it was impervious. these machine guns, if you fly these things in combat fall wass, so close, halted telling me you would have to be strong to control a bomber

because we were flying so close i could hear my wing bumping into the wing of the plane next to me. it is like driving a gigantic truck in the sky, rocking and rolling in the sky. a lot of wind currents in the sky as well. it is tremendously difficult to keep this instrument under control. would dropping the bomb after that affect the handling? prof. miller: a lot. 5000 pounds. the atomic bomb was 9000 pounds. dropping theas bomb, the plane just jumped because you lose that weight. you were jarred like that. happens.n these things would spin sometimes upside down. h,talked to a guy in savanna

he was telling me, he was telling me anything special happened to you? nothing? a little guide it was 90 years old. he said well, there was one mission where the plane flipped, and the pilot was killed, and the copilot was killed, and the navigator was killed, and i was the radio gunner. we flipped upside down and i started to float in the air. i said, nothing happened? [laughter] .e got back, obviously anybody else? course the commander. the eighth air force, a lot of

pressure is going to be on him. a guy named carl spotts was head of the air force. but then baker takes over. his mission is to prepare them to fly, to gain air supremacy over northwestern europe to make the d-day invasion possible. is spotts, who was sent to north africa, he is brought back and has all the american air forces in the european theater. then it is jimmy doolittle. he will change the nature of the air war. war is as new to these guys as the common soldier. they have all the american air forces.

not the america air force, it is the american air forces. he is under tremendous pressure throughout the war from roosevelt, who is under pressure from churchill. these guys cannot fly in daylight. you don't have escorts. you are getting hammered. you're getting hammered so hard your not able to have navigators get to the target properly. why don't you fold up the air force and commented bombers, learn to fly a knife and fly with us? it is safer at night. we don't try to aim specifically at this target or that target. city.e out nighttime, not being able to see doesn't matter. what matters is the luftwaffe.

their casualties are staggering. , i gavee the characters onalk earlier in savannah the film we are making. these are major characters. this is rosie rosenthal. 51 missions, a jewish kid from ,rooklyn, all-american athlete baseball, football, lawyer. got a job with a law firm the day after pearl harbor he volunteers. he kept his bow as long as hitler lived he would fly. he react for a couple of missions and went down three times.

interesting character. comes back of the end of the war and he is transferred out. the war is over in may. he signs up to go to the pacific. he wants to fly the 29th but the war is over. what he does, he is a lawyer. he reads about the nuremberg trials. they sent him to trial to prosecute german civilians who committed atrocities against downed airmen, hanging them, shooting them, throwing them into burning buildings. he went after these guys. he met a girl he liked named phyllis. they fell in love. she is a trial lawyer. they beginning -- they got married at nürnberg during the trial. they came home, closure for him.

oneslped prosecute the big . . really interesting character what a lot of people don't talk about, because veterans don't even like to talk about it when i bring it up, segregation. this is a relentlessly segregated area. there are no african-americans ever in the bombers. nor are the african-americans flying fighter planes out of england. the only african-americans flying our the tuskegee airmen flying out of italy. he insisted it was impossible to maintain crew discipline if you have blacks and whites together, southern whites especially with blacks in the same cabin in close proximity. it's one of the great marks

against the eighth air force. personnel air force in england are black. of peopleless than 1% of color in 1954. they are doing with these guys did, building airbases. detail and trucking take the bombs to the air base. they would show up, deliver the bombs, and asked have a meal. they were not even allowed in the mess hall. they would have to go eat rations and sleeping trucks. ofre were a number racial riots. the english girls would date black guys. a colored night and a night.night --

the white kids like that until they wondered what is my girlfriend doing on the black night when he is in town? the strangest warfront in bucolic countryside, cows, sheep, meadows. d churches in the background. inre were more of those made b-17s. it is a crazy battlefront. war, aike you go to machine full of gas, you come back in your fighting for your life over berlin, you come back to base, clean sheets and good meals, you can get psychiatric or medical care, there's women, there's london. you get a two-day pass to go to london.

you can be at berlin with the girl of your dreams in london at 10:00 at night. it is a different war than thought for a guy on the ground in combat. that has insisted bandages. student: that may not be a shock when they are flying. right.iller: why would they not be flying? student: they are coming from a relaxed state. prof. miller: what would stop a mission? student: the weather. prof. miller: exactly. it is capricious. it comes on you suddenly. is also arunkenness problem. prof. miller: it could be. if you were drunk the night before you flew drunk. the easiest way to get over a hangover is oxygen.

i should not have said that. for the infantrymen, they become callous. for the guys in the air was they come home they can relax. they have to face the problem of getting back in the plane and doing it over and over again. the stress of being relaxed and throwing yourself back into a terrible situation which leads to combat fatigue. prof. miller: that's right. there is electric chair. you walk there, or the one to give you the injection. you have seen it not work a couple of times in the news. you go back to your cell. and you wait three days to die again. that is what these guys did. the pressure builds up. it is enough trauma in the plane. they come back and start thinking about all the time. guys.there are 12 other

there are five empty bunks. maybe you turn them over seed off to see the guys because that could be you. you were just playing softball with him. he is gone. thing,ermittent of the it is horrible. ogallala,combat like all this stuff, -- student: it would be very psychologically taxing to be in situations andr people who are training by sea, because you are stuck. you don't have the backup when you are up in the air. prof. miller: that's right. then the bicycle effect.

bike, you getur back up again. if you sit for two weeks and don't ride the bike again, it is like trauma. or air accidents. you are flying from abe to atlanta. the plane experiences problems. you're not going to want to fly again right away. yet to make a flight six weeks later, you're thinking about it. that is the phobia. student: it is kind of incredible, people have a fear of flying, fear of going into planes. something like that today will stop people from flying. this is a more high stress situation. prof. miller: it is.

almost half of these guys had never been in a plane before. a lot of them did fear heights. they do not like to be up there. a lot of them got airsick. we have a character we are to feature in our hbo series named crosby who died a couple of years ago. every time he went up he would throw up into the oxygen mask. what happens? student: it freezes. prof. miller: and you don't know it sometimes. you do not know if you're pulling oxygen. you don't feel it filling up your lungs. then you have oxygen deprivation. you blank out. it is the worry about this sort of stuff. student: [indiscernible]

that they are used to it now. they are worried because they might make it out. prof. miller: the guys i talked to say, they will tell you the last missions were hell. i made it to 23, i'm going to get it on 25. so many guys did. , a guy had a girlfriend waiting for him. every going to get married the next day. he was on his 25th mission. he had a shell come through the window and blows his head off. he had to land. [inaudible]

imagined one of the other big problems, there was a certain amount of monotony. prof. miller: that's right. the sound of the engine. the plane is filled with cigarette smoke. they are not smoking while they are fighting but they are smoking until the time they reach 12,000 feet. the plane smells like greece and dried blood, and smoke. can -- smoke in the air they could listen to the radio before they got to germany. popular songs, listening to the , listening to the top 20. beautiful countryside. everything else will happen quick, just like that. student: were the reactions of

the men who have to stand there and watch their friends die? prof. miller: they had to go to a country estate, may be moved tobill london. badminton or tennis. it didn't do much good. all you thought about, you would try to get your mind off it. you are still thinking you have got to go back. that is the thing. , -- seamy watch last night what a difficult job being a combat surgeon was.

say iou come to me and can't fly. if you're crazy then you should be crazy because nobody could sanely go to the air and fly. that is the catch. suppose you say parkinson shakes at night. not traumatic night dreams. i'm tossing and turning at nine. angie all the time. i send you right back to the situation i got you there in the first place. send people like you back to the state you couldn't do because your job was to get guys into combat. they are in a difficult position. that is what a lot of guys didn't go to see the combat

surgeon. the cure is just to get me back in the war. i will just punch there and try to get 25 done. you and say to the guy in the plan, watch me. make sure not doing some this point injure the crew. i only need three more missions. the comrades would stick up for you. you are flying with nine fully able guys and that is dangerous. guys would do it help each other out. student: i was wondering when you said the surgeon would treat them and then send them back, how long would they usually have between being cured? prof. miller: we saw sodium pedophile. -- s a trut

it is a truth serum. you can speak, sometimes haltingly. what they usually do, they would lay you down in a dark room and go through the mission. your friends had blue across the plane. releasetrauma, try to the trauma. that was a general so-called cure. the ordinary cure was rest, , light change of clothes therapy, two days, relax you, then send you back unless you had a deep psychosis. they sent you to a medical establishment in england that handled psychic cases, guys that had gone off the edge. they were there long-term. if they were considered

incapable of turning to combat they were sent back to the states and put in a hospital in the states. , iad a guy, sherman small said how did he get through? he said, i pretended i wasn't sherman small. i was in a movie. the luftwaffe for actors. they were fake claims read this was hollywood. it got me through the war. what happened when the movie stopped? he went nuts. he was there and a hospital for three years. commanders on the base never recognized, never wanted to recognize this. because that is taking men away from them. a lot of them distrust to psychoanalysis.

these which doctors are trying to cure these guys. all they need is rest, the commanders are saying. they're ok. they will make it through. as i said before, the british are tough on it. moral fortitude, you just didn't have it, no moral fiber. that was a mistake we made in training by letting you through. this is a guy who got through didn't have the mental fiber. anyone else? flying, when they were are these bombers on a skeleton crew? how vital was it to have everyone? prof. miller: you had to. if one of their guys was sick, but that he had asthma and he couldn't fly, and you put a replacement in, that broke up

the karma. that is bad luck. these guys are superstitious. special jacket here, rabbits foot in here, we are going to wee off in five minutes, no always go at six minutes after 10, not five minutes. the biggest was, because you did work with the guy. it is putting a new infielder in your infield. ok. that was a problem with replacement crews. it happened a lot. individual guys are killed on these planes. all 10 guys survived the war. you came back with a partial crew. planet: what role in the -- reporters.

role do they plan aircraft? prof. miller: cronkite and rooney flew with two other reporters. one was shot down and killed. they had to go through gunner school and the trained as gunners to get certified to be allowed on the plane. they had to perform some sort of function in the plane. on rooney's mission, if they had been attacked by the luftwaffe, if they were attacked he had to operate a machine gun inside the plane. that is what reporters generally did. .e flew with the raf so did ernest hemingway when he went over. equally couple of missions. those are the guys that came back and reported what it was like inside the plane.

one report i read in stars & stripes magazine, the reporters that it is an eerie feeling when they close the door. the propellers go, there is no way out. it is like when you don't want to go on a roller coaster. you are off. her off to war. there is no stopping it. anyone else? we are getting very far in this. this is good stuff. flying from there, ok, .ntermittent flying these are the boys are up against, some crack outfits. they flew, no limits on missions for them. they flew until they died. they were hit pretty heavily. -- adolph all gallant golland.

he went toe to toe with hitler. claim they were -- he would accuse them of absence of bravery, being chickens. that would try him nuts. one time he pulled off his knights cross and threw it on the desk. everyone draws a breath on that one. hitler did not do anything. , curtis lemay, he is a guy who arrives in october of 43. he teaches the air force how to fly. he has a bombardment wing, a whole air division. what lemay says, and he will of course go on and fly, he was in charge of the higher rates

against tokyo. he is in charge of the strategic air command in the 1950's. this is a guy who wanted to bomb cuba. in dr.atirized strangelove. chomping. he is that guy. right wing, left wing, pulled a clay middle -- middle politically, he ran for president with barry goldwater. the guys loved him in the war because he cared about his men, he flew with his crew. he kind of talk them how to fly. the didn't want to execute strategy but he said look, if you see flack in front of you, you can't avoid it. why not?

you couldn't. you are in such a tight box. if you stretched out a little more, what else would this evasive action -- to invasion would cause you miss the target. if you miss the target, you have to go back again. you don't want to go back again. do it right the first time. flack in fronts of you. you have a plexiglass bubble in front of you protecting you. get to fly right into it. the other thing you figured out,

there are a lot of bombardier's that rushed into the war. he said i can't train enough bombardier's. here's what i'm going to do. you are all navigators and , we're going to have a lead bombardier and a lead navigator. that is one of you guys. you're the lead guy, i'm going to really train you. you are the smartest guy on the crew. we are one to really train you. when you drop your bomb, everyone drops a bomb at the same time. you drop a smoke, it is called dropping on the leader. you put a highly skilled guy in the lead plane. get a lot lessto

mishaps on missions with well-trained crews. strategies, the bombing starts to get a little more effective. when the win against these u-boats, what was the problem? they were bulletproof. prof. miller: bulletproof. bombproof. they are bonkers. they are not actually underground. take a shoebox, turn the shoebox entrancewaylittle on there. they floated to the protection of the bumper, reinforced concrete. it is as big as me.

six feet tall of concrete. germans must go here and think how could we lose the war if we can build bunkers like this? here is the problem. the sub is under protection. you know we can't hit it. how do you send men out on missions like that? that is why that movie 12:00 high deals with that. don't gorate trainings through this course because trainers say to them here is their situation. you take over a company, we are not selling product for the customer doesn't want it. we still have to sell the product. how do we keep morale up where everything is a loss? a [indiscernible]

this guy was under that stress and dilemma. it never works. the operation never works. were finally killed at sea. -- submarines of had to be on the surface a lot of times. they had to,. you could spot them and then call in task forces. the small aircraft carrier, send the planes against it. try to catch the equipment if you can. try to catch the personnel. if not, down the submarine. they are killed at sea, not their bases. these guys are flying against targets they cannot see well and

cannot hit. when they hit them by this is like churchill saying, for your air force up. -- fold your air force up and do something else. a typical mission. he had foot pedals here. this is your bombardier. he controlled these two browning machine guns. a scary position. the scariest thing about this position, just looking at it. anyone? student: you would just be looking down at the air between you and the ground. prof. miller: by quick observation, you are looking like hanging over a cliff straight down. student: you don't have much metal beneath you.

prof. miller: when they open up, all you are seeing is what looks like a spark, a flame coming out of the barrel of the gun. they had air to air rockets that were missiles. everything seems to be coming in on you. what were you doing while this was happening? yes, until you get to the target. then what do you have to do? you drop the bomb, what position are you in? you can look at what is coming at you. you're looking into this thing, hanging over the edge of the cliff. so you can't fire back.

you've got to do this. it's like caring the regiment flag in the civil war without a gun. i told position in the plane. -- a tough position in the plane. i like this shot, because look at the faces. look how young they are. it reminds me of my junior varsity football team. just prepared for war. look at these kids. amazing. another dread they had was going over the english channel. there was not much air-sea rescue if you went down. sometimes celebrities flew, like clark gable, star of "gone with the wind" carol lumbar was killed. she kept telling him, clark, you got to get any more. when she died, he was driven to

boot camp and training. he came out as an air gunner. he almost wants to die he has taken such crazy chances. jimmy stewart was a commander in the war. good of the city machine. -- a good publicity machine. this man is sitting like an embryo in the egg. how would you like to be in this position? they had an electrical suit they could wear. wearing -- they are wired like old-fashioned christmas trees. if one light went out, all the lights went out. it would drive me nuts. you can't guess the thing up in time for the kids.

electrical suits. you don't know if it is going to work or not. who is the most vulnerable person in the plane, you might think it would be this guy, but it is actually the pilot. they are all alone during combat. a lot of times they would try to get you from below. there is the first group, one of the first groups to return intact after 25 missions. may in aber until 1942, 1943. guys -- i checked last night -- that flew in that

77 percent of them were casualties. student: when the crews completed 25 missions, what about the planes? where they retired? prof. miller: they flew her back. morgan was engaged to a girl from memphis. the plane was kept in memphis. when he got back, his girlfriend broke up with him. generally, the crew went home and the plane stayed. sometimes you take the markings off the plane, but that was rare. you had the number of home runs.

-- of bomb runs. "destroy the furher," something like that. student: were there any superstitions on writings on the bombs? prof. miller: no, they just sent little humorous messages. here. that, like right easter egg for hitle r." sometimes they work live -- were live when you were loading them. so if it dropped-- 17 people were vaporized in new england where there was once a plane. ground crews gone, a huge

explosion. it was tough work. here's a classroom where everyone paid attention. nobody went to sleep. i can't imagine going in there at 6:00 in the morning. they have that big wall map covered. back,hey pull the curtain and you saw a long line from england. it was string. the longer the string, the tougher the mission. you got an inkling half an hour before. you went to breakfast and they were serving real eggs, the guy used to collect the last supper. especially if there was bacon with it, that means you are going to berlin. the room gets real quiet.

this operations officer in a half-hour explained everything about the mission. the target, the wind conditions, the weather over the target, the expected weather coming back. the expected nature of the opposition. you had to memorize all of that. these are the officers. these are the guys in charge. then there is a special session for navigators, bombardier's, pilots, and copilots. everyone was here for the initial thing. then you're off. the gunners would be out already greasing up the guns. copilot, navigator, bombardier, engineer would run out on a jeep. string, you long got the protestant chaplain to bless the plane, bless the crew.

one man was jewish, and had no rabbis. i go to the protestant guy, i go to the catholic guy, cover all my bases. then i say a prayer from the torah. that's not new work airport. they're not flying out every 12 minutes. they are flying out 45 seconds apart, one after the other. -- this is not newar airport. 11-12ld be magnified times what it is you're all over the country. you don't want everything concentrated. one squad is a my way. -- a mile away. that is why they wrote english bikes around the bases. -- rode english bikes. you took off one after the other . on, bendedur radio

around like this. cloudsou pop out of the like a fish popping out of water. and it was all clear. it takes you an hour to get through the overcast going slowly. you can't see anything if you are in the clouds. if you're an explosion with fire and smoke all of the place, you know the plane in front of you is blowing up. a lot of these planes would run into each other taking off or landing. i tried this number of accidents close to the bases in england. you pop out and there would be multicolored planes. you would rally around that plane. off you go and you are joined by bombers from other bases. trains, asey had air they call them, 60-70 miles long, sometimes longer.

on some flights, the first plane would have its nose over amsterdam and the tail would still be over england. that is how big these things were. ter planes. figher the english were coming back with 500 and night. they said the ground was shaking all the time. incessant. there is the navigators sitting at his seat, oxygen mask on. he doesn't have his parachute on, in this case. but that is a staged photograph. this is a radio gunner. he would fire a gun at the rear

of the plane from an opening on the top. he would be open to the air so he could stick his head. as well. staged shot as in combat, before would be filled with these slippery cartridges as you fire. you would be slipping and sliding on these things, and the guy right behind you. he doesn't have a helmet on. but he's really bundled up for the cold. if his gun would jam, he would take his glove off and do the operation. a lot of guys took cameras with them. this is on the bomb run. the bomb bay doors open up. tragically, some guys were blown to smithereens in the air.

places a crash that takes over in english base. look at how thick that overcast is. here you waited for the guys to return. student: in that picture with the explosion., is that overcast due to clouds or smoke from combat? prof. miller: they are coming back from a long mission over england, looking for their base. they're looking at tremendous overcast, maybe a ceiling of 6000 feet. you can't see the airfield. it's a very small space. it's hard to recognize your

field. a lot of guys landed at the wrong place. this is the caprice of the air war. you could have beautiful weather when you went out, for the targets you were bombing, but overcast sets in. england,int -- and your base is clouded up. ordinarily you don't fly in this weather. rything.grounds eve but you have to landed it, or else you die. they intercepted german radio signals. they picked up german weather reports. they are meteorologists -- england always gets continental weather. planes andd weather

observation planes over the target. day of theon the nation and try to assess the situation. -- the day of the mission. they believe a: 30 in the morning. at 8:30 in the morning, they would be flying over at daybreak. you never factored in home weather, the mission it just went forward. and sayo a battle,a i'm directing a tank battle. i'm getting hammered on my right and i want reinforcements. you change the nature of the battle by moving reinforcement around, or i can make a strategic retreat. to get better cover. , in an air battle you could not do that.

they were ordered to go to the target, muscle through, bomb it, and come back. ve action evasio with flak. none of them were ever turned back. the results were calamitous. you cannot redirect the battle. a strange thing, too. i can walk the battlefield in the civil war and say, was lee crazy to do this? well, we hurt them with accurate. in other words, i can play with the battle because you can go to the site.

no one returns from an error battle. -- from an air battle. thena beautiful day, there's carnage in the sky. one airman told me, you dump pillars, engines, men, into a giant ashtray. -- you dump-- you are seeing men dropping with parachutes, propellers going down. click eight hieronymus bosch -- it's like a hieronymus bosch painting. airman can't go back to anything but their old basis. you rarely saw corpses. ground guys with sequences all the time.

corpses alld see the time. at the battle of the bulge, they got so hardened by warfare that they would sit on a comment's dead -- on their comrade's dead body and eat rations on top of them. that is how desensitized you could get in battle. this was a different kind of war, the air war. there are nobodies here. they were vaporized. saw in a book like i was hitchhiking -- a guy with hitchhiking and in and balance -- and an ambulance stopped him. instead of getting in the cabin, he goes to the back of it. they are screaming, no! he opens it up and sees six dead bodies on the stretchers. fish white, dead. there is not a lot of closure.

breathingng here and air, which is keeping me alive. i like sunshine. sunshine is great. but air is a killer. at 12,000 feet, it is fatal. and the sunshine, it's a bright day, a good day for hunting. summertime, guys would pray for clouds. scene here is something we saw briefly in the film "the air war," but this is a real case thee they couldn't retract plane. waswhole plexiglas thing

shattered. the guy, well, you can imagine what happened to him. his remains were taken in a coffee can. these the guys that returned from the vision. they were not happy. most of the time it was depressing. one time he saw a volleyball game being played. you could watch the game for an hour, no one was screaming. just silence. everybody is calm. in a prison, you count your days until you get out. on admission, -you count- on a -- on a mission, you would count your days until you get out.

have to kill to go home. student: did they have ceremonies for bodies in the air? prof. miller: they would take trips to england. on the cieling of a pub, some of these guys would smoke cigars and mark the guy's initials with it inashes, oir burn with lighters. then you went to the bar. let's say there were two guys that went down, five of us are sitting at the bar, you drink to full glasses of beer at the bar. and that was the simple. -- two full glasses. that was the symbol.

you forget about it because you can't dwell on that. one of your friends dies today, you are in mourning for a long. of time. -- for a long period of time. gyuys learned they couldn't do that in the war very quickly. they handle to death by avoiding it. when he came in, there was a red cross drill. coffee, doughnuts, a little camaraderie. some of the guys didn't make it back. photograph given to me from an archivist of the savanna museum. son, bothfather and

farmers. they pick this guy up on the ground and are hauling him away. he was interrogated afterwards. him away to a barn and briefed him. we're going to put you in charge of a woman will take you to spain or gibraltar. don't act like an american. the big problem was, you had to take your uniform off. the minute you take your uniform captured, youe could be a spy. the gestapo could kill you. they would put their dog tags, sew them into their arm so that if they were caught, they'd pull the dog tag out and say, army, air force. a lot of these women were caught by the gestapo.

some of them died in concentration camps under torture. a lot of guys thought about escape and evasion. any questions up until now? this is the moment when the air war changes. we get through the 12:00 high period. the 8th continues to flight unescorted missions into germany. they are getting pummeled. the 20 strikes -- the twin strikes.

here is october. the entire war is in the balance. february,january, march, april, may -- five months. they have to achieve air security. -- air superiority. they are losing and that is when panic sets in. arnoldin the sense that, from washington replaces him with doolittle. what saves them is not jimmy doolittle, but what we started talking about today. there are those winged tanks. momentthat nick of time when the whole course of the air war is reversed. up, the luftwaffe comes

they can't handle these guys. they are too fast, too quick, to nimble. -- too nimble. the pilots are extremely well-trained. the bombers are in a tough position, they are used as bait and they know it. doolittle will say, bomb berlin. someone might say we ought, to be hitting the oil refineries rather than a big city. but the game is to make sure you have air superiority for the invasion. that means destroying the waffle. this is the plane second do it. but only if the luftwaffle comes up and fight.

they will fight over berlin, but why is that? student: is the center of german culture and a camel to be bombed over and over. prof. miller: hitler can't allow something like that to happen. the price of nationalism kills him in this case. they had the best fighter defenses in the reich. it is an economic powerhouse, but still. a dictatorship does depend somewhat unpopular opinion. spies going to lunch meetings. -- they had spies going to nazi

meetings. they dropped a lot of ordinance on berlin. in some raids, 17,000 bombs. they are there. as one german told me, as a kid, i knew the first time they hit berlin. they hit the hell out of it. if they can do it once, they will do it again and again until there is no berlin. that is exactly what happened. the russians finished it off with their artillery. 'em is thed kill strategy. there is no plane that the luftwaffle has that can handle these mustang. the only outside chance, the wildcare, is that hitler could

have gotten jets. he had a jet wing. they didn't have proper fuel and they did make enough of them. if they had a jet aircraft going 700 miles an hour, they could have won the air war. it would have been decisive. but he didn't get the numbers in time. you bomb berlin, let's say the furher is on the radio screaming and pounding the table that we will get revenge on the british. you can't hit new york. they were working on a rocket called the new york rocket that could go all the way to new york. they had heisenberg working on nuclear warheads. hitler puts most of his funding into these weapons, the v2

rocket. it caused a lot of damage in london. instead of putting money into jets, he did this. student: they should have won an award for helping us win the war. exactly.ler: another fighter pilot. he is flying a thunderbolt. they almost did as much damage as the mustang. going in low. we lost a lot of aces.

these missions were the most dangerous because the germans had heavy air cap presents. cutting the grass, as they called it. 10-11 feet off the ground. those are dangerous missions. a lot of good flyers lost their lives on missions like that. finally, this point. here is the moral dilemma of the bomb war. it is summed up in these two slides. this takes us ahead to the period beyong d-day. this is an oil refinery. oil, which they made from coal. brown coal, is called, soft coal. the soft -- the south africans make it like that today. germany doesn't have a lot of natural cold. -- natural coal.

if you are going to bomb that, there is no danger in the middle of nowhere. it's like being in the netherlands with the giants stadium. there is nothing around it. you don't get bombs drifting off course. we start to hit the target just before d-day, then incessantly afterwards. we knocked the german air force out of the sky. we don't knock out their production facilities. the germans were producing as many planes in 1944 as they were in 1943. how can you say that we beat the loop waffle -- the luftwaffle? what they did was kill the experienced pilots.

they sent up pilots with 12 hours experience against guys that have 120-150 hours in the air. it is a pilot killing campaign. it comes at a tremendous cost. casualties before d-day, justin the period -- just in the period before february and june. 10,500 american airmen killed. how many people do you think were killed on d-day? anybody have a guess? student: 60,000? prof. miller: no. student: wasn't it like 5000? 10,000.ller:

killed on omaha beach, believe it or not, less than 2000. it is a horrible place, but less than 2000. they saw everything. these guys horrific casualties. it started with a rifle company.

i am thinking to myself, why isn't there a monument on the speech to these guys, the 18,500 casualties who died making the invasion possible? five times the number killed on omaha beach. it is a little-known aspect of the war. but it makes the invasion absolutely possible. it is a last-minute thing. here is we get into moral problems. what would you do in a situation like this? we know where we're going to land on d-day.

we know germans are going to rush reinforcements to the beach. they just don't know where they are going to. how are the going to rush reinforcements? by rail. tanks, troops, things like that. france. city in trainyard, where these trains are assembled, what is around it? probably workers. a town where workers live very close to where they work. marshalling yard -- you don't want to bomb the train when it leaves the marshaling yard. why not?

student: why don't you want to bomb the trade? prof. miller: yeah, the moving train. student: you can bomb the track and prevent them from moving further. prof. miller: in the yard, they are assembling a lot of trains. train would bring around 700 troops. they all transferred to a larger train towards normandy beach. that is the marshaling that takes place. why hit a coal mine? why even bomb a factory? why not bomb the train

yard that is carrying the coal? you are in a moral dilemma. if george drum -- if your bomb drifts, you killing civilians. you could kill up to 600,000 of them. eisenhower wanted to go with it, roosevelt wanted to go with it. but churchill said it would kill a lot of frenchman, and destroy anglo-french relations for 100 years. even cutis lemay firebombed japanese and dropped leaflets. hit byies have to be

surprise attack. they are dangerous missions. and the d-day clock is running. that is what they go after. student: obviously the deaths are tragic, but if you look at it from another perspective-- prof. miller: that is what we are looking at. student: don't you have to make these choices? prof. miller: as emily said, they didn't set out to kill. don't,: and if they more people die. prof. miller: that's for sure. that's the moral argument. for the atomic bomb, they made the argument that the war would have went on. conventional bombing could have killed more people than atomic bombing. the war wasn't going to stop.

i don't know. we reduced it to a numbers game. prof. miller: it took a toll on the pilots. some of the commanders were very blunt and called these baby killing operations. refuse or stubbornly they would be out of the air force. but later on we see this come up again. the eighth air force starts going after more civilian centers. that is not how we started the work. we would surgically bomb from high up, not a lot of collateral damage. we were not like the british.

student: if we had went through with operation downfall, that would have been awful not only for the japanese, but for the americans too. prof. miller: i like the way you are putting it. what you have to do in these situations-- prof. miller: you don't know what the consequences of the decision will be. we know there were 45,000 killed later. we have to put ourselves in the heads of those making decisions.

history flows like the narrative of life itself. you go through the course of things. you go one step at a time. that, to me, is good history, that is good storytelling. in c the dilemma that people base, not knowing the consequent is. you start to think about numbers. over, and2,000 guys if these trains get through and troops get through, maybe they are stopped. maybe the whole invasion goes kaput. this is a tough decision. student: the germans are necessarily fighting in a moral way. if the americans and british wanted to fight in a moral way,

they may not have won the war. they were cheating almost-- prof. miller: is not really cheating. it's an excellent point. that is how a lot of the bomber pilots would argue back to me when i raise it as a question. they said, hitler really took the country to war. hitler was supported by the whole country. what one german tommy was interesting. he said the minute i supported the furher and he went to war in poland and i supported that war, i put my whole family in high jeopardy. if famous german writer went on the radio, didn't you expect reprisals for what you did? didn't you expect consequences? here they are.

saturation bombing by the british. having bombing by the americans. women and children will die. 6,000 germans killed, six thirds of them -- many of them were women. student: would the average farmer have sentiments against german people? -- average bomber. prof. miller: there was a lot of hate in their hearts. unlike an infantrymen, they are not facing them. there is a certain kind of in personality. i need to call the air war impersonal, because it is so close. but it is a little more impersonal, pushing a button,

sending a rocket. student: did that rationalization make it easier on the guys? prof. miller: a lot of them did know about the camps. buzzing about the -- but they knew about the s.s. as the germans were moving towards the beaches, they went to small towns. hang every man and boy above the age of 14. they would put people in churches and burn the churches to the graph. -- to gthe ground. that is going on while this is happening. we have intelligence to know what is going on in the ground. we know from the french, who are

reporting this on the radio. once you go to war, everything changes. momentum allres a on its own. you cannot stop it. wars don't wind down, they get worse and worse. student: they go to the pacific pretty fast. prof. miller: the airfields would have been lengthened. we knew that we were close to winning by march. it's not until march that we get troops on german soil. once that happens, in the russians come cascading across poland, we have germany in a pincer moment.

that is when you know it will be over. than the bombing stops. we call off the bombing. germany didn't say uncle, it's over, we just called off because it was extraneous. we knocked out 60 german cities, turned them to sender --. and ash. this is the moral dilemma, because we don't know if we are going to win. that is why d-day is important. if we don't get on the continent, we may not win, but the war might be prolonged 2 years. that is the decision they had to make. if" thing at the new orleans world war ii museum. we have dilemmas like this documented. we have visitors in museum vote

what they would want to do, bomb or not bomb. this comes out about even, 50-50. i think i mentioned another one, where soldiers used human shields, japanese soldiers used civilians -- pregnant women. .hey charged americans what do you do with that one? we haven't put that one up yet. we showed it to a test group, and they thought it was too tough for young people to be faced with something like that. but that is what happened in warfare all the time. they had to make the decisions all the time. student: the initial target was to illuminate factories and but killing workers.

[indiscernible] prof. miller: the british put all kinds of euphemisms on a saturation bombing. don't call it saturation bombing, they told their commanders. call it de-housing. wow, de-housing. he says, i'm not out to hit houses or factories, i'm out to kill german workers. that was one official's ideda. let's wrap up on this idea of intention. you are in a german city, any city -- munich. day --s a dual raid that

americans at day, british at night. you are a housewife and have three kids. your husband is fighting on the russian front, or is killed on the russian front. you go to the cellar of your house when you hear the fire alarm. it's the air raid signal. down you go into the cellar. you are down there with a candle in your three kids. the americans are going to try to bomb accurately, but i can't. the british are going to knock the whole city out. what do you prefer? which raid would you prefer? student: i'd much prefer the american one is either a much better chance coming out a lot. prof. miller: you do. -- coming out alive. prof. miller: the simplistic example i gave-- can matter.

that is what the air community argued. we didn't start it, they did, etc. they are running the holocaust, blah. the nature of the enemy calls for semi-barbaric tactics like saturation bombing, they thoug . t. the big heroes in britain or the fighter boys. those defending the homeland. these guys want to dresden, flew very tough missions. half of them who flew died. africa, andin north they would get, a campaign medal. they didn't get a medal for the

bomber war. they would raise a statute to arthur harris in london. groups drew blood all over the thing. they still feel undervalued. they still believe in the cause they were fighting for. that's just from their perspective. they had to believe that. student: if you're a german citizen who lived near those , if a bomb hits you, do you go to some one else's house? do you know there is a target around the train yard, or would they not be told? prof. miller: you knew. in the french and belgian people knew at this point. there were evacuations from these areas. there was a lot of evacuation

from a big cities. the whole evacuation program starts in london when the back weight all the kids. -- they evacuate all the kids. they took them to the countryside with borders. boarding houses. a lot of that happened in germany. when a town gets wiped out like hamburg, where to the people go? houses have been lost. 60,000 houses have been lost. they extend all over germany. someone has to take them in. they have to go somewhere. ed conditionsaz sometimes. i described one instance in the book where woman is sitting on a train. she doesn't have any soot or marks from the bombing on her, like two other women.

they look over and say, at least leastrvived and got -- at you survived and got out with your luggage. she's not quite right and she opens her suitcase and pulls out what looks like a doll. and it was her vaporized child, once 5'2". produced by the fire to this. -- reduced by the fire to this. she was carrying it around in a suitcase. that was how "off'people would get. imagine being in a city like cologne and getting hit 100 times. like 100 9/11s. the ironic thing -- you talk about the chance thing. whether a bomb drops on you were not his luck. they are just lucky if user i've and unlucky -- lucky if you survive and unlucky if you are dead. they survive, it's good luck.

they could do nothing about it he cut they just had to go straight ahead. there are two victories in the bomber war. of the one we always talk about. -- there are two victims. i should be in a history course, and instead i'm flying to leipzig. and is not going to be friendly. student: what happened to these bombers after the war? prof. miller: scrapped. summer in museums. -- some are in museums. we have one at the world war ii museum in new orleans. there's one on the ice of the new family that crash landed there. -- there is one up on the ice in

newfoundland. deep -- there -- a propellors were bent., you cannot use your radio. and entrepreneur from ohio rescued the plane of the ice, brought it back to a small airport in ohio, reconstructed the plane. the airport told him that he was m theyer -- they told hi would not rent to him anymore. so he gave his plane way to the world war ii museum. now we have it hanging in the rowing center. -- boeing center. they were scrapped. some people in midland, texas cut the nose off.

someone went into a big gigantic junkyard and cut off the nose. they have that hanging like so many paintings. there is a film about airmen returning from the war. the ariman goes to a scrapyard -- the airman goes to a scrapyard and looks among the junk. okay guys, thanks a lot. i will see you next week. we will do d-day. >> join us each saturday evening at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern for classroom lectures from across the country. on topics and era of american history. lectures in history are also available as podcasts. visit our website at c-span.org/history/podcasts. or down them -- download them

from itunes. >> in 1935, friend wendy roosevelt put his signature -- franklin d roosevelt put his signature on the social security act. >> this social security measure gives at least some protection to 30 million of our citizens with direct employment benefits and compensation and to increase services for the project and of children and the prevention of their health. >> 15 years later, congress passed a new social security law, to meet today's news. signed by president truman in 1950, it gives social security a new meaning for you. and so today, this is the portrait of the future. a picture which social security helps make possible. under the social security act, most american families are now

able to answer for themselves in income -- insurer for themselves -- ensur and income for themselvese. bought andhat is paid for. >> monday, on the indicators. -- on "the communicators." >> he always heard about silicon valley and dreamed about getting to america. from a young age, that is what he vied to do. >> bloomberg businessweek technology reporter ashley vance on one of silicon valley's most inventive leaders, elon musk. >> he is seen as this steve jobs kind of figure. he has this attention to detail. he pushes his workers very hard.

i tend what i have really taken away is he is a guy who gets thousands of engineers at tesla, the brightest of the bright and hard-working individuals and is able to get products out of them that can be commercialized and really change industry. who have is the guy combined software hardware and add ons and bits in a way that nobody else has. >> monday night on "communicators." >> historian and author discusses the battle of mobile bay in august of 1864, and the leadership roles of union rear admiral david farragut and confederate admiral franklin buchanan. providing resulted in a union victory and closed one of the

confederacy's last major ports. the victory, coupled with the fall of atlanta gave a boost to president abraham lincoln's bid for reelection just a couple of months later. the mariners museum host this 45 minute event. [applause] john: there is an unseen battlefield in every human breast where two opposing forces me to and where they seldom rest. the battle of mobile bay is actually the story of a contest between the two highest ranking naval officers in the civil war, david farragut and franklin buchanan. if you think of two opposing wills, that is what you have happening at the battle of mobile bay. first, i want to talk about who these characters are.

first let's start with franklin buchanan, since he was on one of our ironclads here in hampton roads. franklin buchanan was born on september 17, 1800 in baltimore, maryland. his father was founder of the maryland medical society and his grandfather was a signer of the declaration of independence. he comes from a well-heeled family. he will become a mid-shipment at age 18. he will serve with distinction by 1844. he will be promoted to captain, and he will be named the first superintendent of the united states naval academy in annapolis. he is the founder in many ways of that school. in 1847 he will resign from that

post so he conserve actively in the mexican war, which again he does with distinction, gaining the attention of flag officer matthew perry. perry will decide on buchanan as flag captain and commander of perry's flagship. it is said buchanan was the first naval officer to step foot in japan. let me tell you about buchanan. he is 5'10", he is bald. he was just as arbitrary as nelson. it is said in tokyo bay the chinese pilot would run the